Principle B and Contrastive Stress

We investigated performance on Principle B in 37 children aged 3;1 to 6;10. The study was designed to test predictions made by two different accounts of children's poor performance on Principle B. One account, according to which children have a non-adult binding domain, predicts that children who do not show knowledge of Principle B will reject sentences like John told Mary about himself. The other account attributes poor performance on Principle B to exposure to sentences like I chose me and insensitivity to contrastive stress. This account predicts that children who do not show knowledge of Principle B will not show sensitivity to contrastive stress. We used a comprehension task to test sensitivity to contrastive stress and elicited grammaticality judgments. The results did not confirm the first hypothesis hut strongly supported the second. There was a high correlation between performance on Principle B and sensitivity to contrastive stress.

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